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Moscow Journal;Stalin's Music Man Is a Kremlin Star Again

Stalin's last surviving apparatchik has made a triumphant return to the Kremlin.

Tikhon N. Khrennikov, 82, a composer who in his 40 years at the head of the Soviet Composers Union was best known for stifling the great Russian composers Shostakovich and Prokofiev, did not fade away after Communism collapsed.

Instead, the grandiose music he created for a new ballet, "Napoleon Bonaparte," is being performed to sellout crowds at the 6,000-seat Kremlin Palace of Congresses, under the sponsorship of York International Corporation, an American manufacturer of air-conditioning and heating equipment.

In one of the stranger twists of Russian life, some of the greatest dissident artists and writers to have survived the Soviet period, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, are ignored and even mocked in their newly democratic homeland, while some of the party faithful they struggled against are serenely reaping the rewards of the unexamined life.

And few have defied the odds of history more than Mr. Khrennikov, who faithfully carried out the policy of artistic repression and control that were established in Stalin's time, and is now seeing his works performed thanks to the very capitalism he spent his career denouncing. He is unrepentant about his past and buoyant about his future.

"I was buried in paperwork, speeches," he said of the job Stalin handpicked him for and which he held onto until the Soviet Union, and the Composers Union, collapsed in 1991. He spoke in the vast, cluttered apartment in central Moscow where he has lived since Stalin's time. "Now I am responsible only for myself -- at last I am absolutely free."

His latest work, a lavish, studiously classical ballet that chronicles the rise and fall of Russia's greatest enemy, Napoleon, is being performed by the Kremlin Ballet in a vast concert hall built under Khrushchev, with walls still encrusted with the Soviet hammer and sickle. Mr. Khrennikov devoted much of his life to keeping Soviet music free of the taint of jazz, "formalism" and avant-garde atonality, and the music he composed -- sweepingly orchestral and derivative of Tchaikovsky -- reflects it.

Although he composed hundreds of works, ranging from folk music to movie scores, symphonies and operas, Mr. Khrennikov is more likely to go down in history for the famous 1948 speech he delivered attacking "formalism" and the works of Shostakovich, Prokofiev and other major Russian composers. That chilling denunciation set the tone for Soviet censure and oppression for decades to come. Now, Mr. Khrennikov says he did not write that speech, and that it was thrust into his hands a few hours before he was due to speak.

"I'd like to see someone get an order from the Central Committee to do something and refuse," he said. "You had to live in that atmosphere to understand what was going on."

Even before he was anointed by Stalin, Mr. Khrennikov curried favor with the Bolsheviks. His breakthrough composition was a 1939 opera entitled "V'Buryu" ("Into The Storm") that featured Lenin as a character. His work of socialist realism was held up by Communist leaders as an antidote to the "decadence" of Prokofiev's "Semyon Kotko." Mr. Krennikov's success in the party was sealed.

Mr. Khrennikov, who says he still despises jazz, evinces noregret over his past, saying he did what he could behind the scenes to help his fellow composers. "Nobody could say no to Stalin," he explained, pulling a finger across his neck to mimic the slitting of a throat. And he asserts that it was he who, after Stalin's death, pushed Soviet authorities in 1958 to rescind the party's 1948 resolution condemning such artists as Shostakovich. "I did what I could to help my colleagues," he said. "My conscience is clear."

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The renowned cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who fled the Soviet Union in 1974, now returns fairly frequently to Russia to perform -- and extend his blessings on the victory over Communism. Mr. Khrennikov does not attend his concerts.

"We were friends once," Mr. Khrennikov said gingerly. "Some people even say I helped him make his career. I have nothing against him, but we don't speak now."

But Mr. Rostropovich's outspoken wife, the opera diva Galina Vishnevskaya, paints a starkly different picture of Mr. Khrennikov in her autobiography. She describes the head of the Composers Union as a "clever, scheming courtier," who campaigned against former mentors, including Shostakovich, and had to be shamed by Mr. Rostropovich into giving Prokofiev, who was unable to make ends meet after being repudiated by the Composers Union, some rubles to live on.

There are Russians who defend Mr. Khrennikov. "He helped a lot of people at a difficult time," said Eduard Alekseyev, a music scholar and a former member of the Composers Union. When the union held its first free election in 1990, its members voted to keep the well-connected Mr. Khrennikov in office.

"Somebody had to do it," Mr. Alekseyev said. "Anyone else in his place would have been even worse."

But history is unlikely to disregard his politics in favor of his music.

"As a composer, he was a nonentity," said Richard Taruskin, a music professor at the University of California at Berkeley. "There is no debate about that. Politically, he is an ambiguous figure -- he did some good and some bad. The question is whether he was forced to."

Mr. Khrennikov said he jumped at the offer to compose the music for "Napoleon Bonaparte," because all his life he had yearned to create a tribute to an epic historical figure.

In the 1940's, Prokofiev composed the score for Sergei Eisenstein's film "Ivan the Terrible," which was not released in full until 1958 in the thaw that followed Stalin's death.

Mr. Khrennikov said that, about the same time, he too started working on a major musical production -- an opera -- about Ivan the Terrible. But he abandoned it upon learning that Stalin didn't think the famous Russian tyrant had been terrible enough.